A twittering teen down on Tybee
Posts pics of her stuff labeled BUY ME
Her plan is to leave
Her parents will grieve
And then she’ll start over and fly free

My old creative director always used to say, “When in doubt, rhyme or alliterate.”

I didn’t like this assignment. I don’t have a great fondness for limerick, never have, but I tried to stick with the traditional place naming in the first line, etc. One thing in the assignment didn’t make sense to me. It’s cool that they try to make things pretty open ended just to get people posting, but this instruction bugged me a little:

If you prefer free verse over rhymed poetry, your challenge is particularly interesting: can you write a five-line free-verse poem that’s clearly a limerick?

A strict rhyme scheme is part of the defiition of a limerick, so if you’re going free verse/no rhymes, then by definition it is not a limerick, so saying it could “clearly” be a limerick just doesn’t make sense to me.

This bit got to me as well:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

That’s a lot of Ps! My ear is definitely pricked, but does it mean anything? Hard to say.

It does mean something, and something fairlyspecific (two separate links) at that, so it’s pretty easy to say. Why the diss on Peter Piper? Hrmph.

The topic of journey encompassed all meanings of the word, and despite starting out thinking I’d write a little ditty about that old creative director and how he moved down to Mexico, I wound up with something about a runaway girl. Tybee is a weird place — really poor and really rich all jumbled together on a little strip of sea island (with feral cats). The teens there range from accomplished to apathetic, as anywhere, but because Tybee is so small, it’s hard not to notice the high incidence of drug use among teens, and to see that among the lower economic tier there’s an attitude of giving up before they even hit 18, focusing on Facebook updates and parties rather than trying to get out of the cycle. (Admittedly, Tybee doesn’t do a good job of giving them other things to do there.) Bah, bummer poem.